Long overdue: Britain admits responsibility for Bloody Sunday

Oli Scarff/Getty ImagesFamilies of the victims of the Bloody Sunday killings address the crowd outside the Guildhall building in Londonderry following the announcement of the content of the Saville Report findings that all victims were innocent.

The British government has, at long last, done the decent thing in acknowledging the British army’s role in the “bloody Sunday” murder of 14 unarmed Irish protestors, mostly teenagers, in Ulster 38 years ago.

What took so long? The answer lies with London’s decades-long political subservience to the Ulster Protestant majority’s need to lord it over its Catholic neighbors and its fear of growing Catholic civil rights demands. Indeed, the killings occurred at a January 1972 civil rights march in Londonderry (or Derry, as Catholics call it).

Ulster today, with its power-sharing Protestant-Catholic government, is a far cry from Ulster then. Catholics were a despised underclass, powerless and grossly discriminated against at that time. The British government of the day whitewashed the killings, absolving the Army and placing blame on alleged shooters in the crowd — and, in the process, ignited a nearly 30-year war with the Irish Republican Army that cost more than 3,600 lives.

David Cameron, Britain’s new Tory prime minister, gave the lie this week to the depiction of Irish demonstrators as the real instigators. A new study of the incident, 12 years in the making, found the killings “both unjustified and unjustifiable,” Cameron told parliament. The troops suffered a “widespread loss of discipline,” he said.

Lest Americans be too self-righteous, it must be remembered that something similar happened here, too — at Ohio’s Kent State University in 1970. In both cases, the question is the same: Why were troops armed with live ammunition in a confrontation with mostly peaceful, though admittedly angry, civilian demonstrators?

It’s unclear what Cameron’s admission of British wrongdoing all those years ago will produce. Relatives of the shooting victims want murder trials, but not all the old scores can be settled without rousing new grievances. Memories of the injustice suffered by a past generation of Ulster Catholics, while neither forgotten nor forgiven, might best be put aside in the interest of a better future for all in Northern Ireland.

With the advent of the power-sharing government, Catholics have begun to assert their rightful role in Ulster. It’s progress few would have thought possible on that deadly day in January 1972.